GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Professional and amateur football players often suffer traumatic brain injuries, like a concussion, from playing the game.
FOX 11 took a behind the scenes tour at Lambeau Field Sunday to check out the NFL’s safety protocols as the league tries to improve the game for its players.
“What they’re showing really are replays of potential injury-causing hits,” said Jeff Miller the NFL’s executive vice president for health and safety.
It’s a monitor called ‘the injury video review system.’
From the video monitor on the sidelines to a booth overlooking the field, Miller tells FOX 11 doctors and trainers review each hit, sometimes more than a dozen times.
“They say, ‘I’d like to see that hit on 27 can you replay that for me.'”
When a player gets hurt during a game, what you see is them being carried off the field, but what you don’t see is them being taken to a blue tent on the sideline.
Inside the tent and away from the distraction of 80,000 fans it’s a critical time for experts to determine what happens next.
“They can pretty quickly come to an idea whether or not that player is demonstrating no signs and symptoms of a concussions, which frequently happens and that player can then go back to the game, or whether they need a more substantial examination; In which case they leave the tent and go off to the locker room.”
Things like speech and memory are tested right away. This quick response, Miller says, is crucial to diagnosing concussions.
Miller works for the NFL to advance safety in the game. He looks at everything from evolving the rules of the game to testing equipment, like helmets.
“They replicate on field conditions both the speeds the magnitudes of the hit so you’re talking 3 different speeds, 15 different impact locations. I think we’ve seen 50 or so rule changes over the last 15 years designed to improve the health and safety of the sport.”
Progress to making NFL football better for those on the field.
According to the NFL, concussions for players dropped by 29 percent in 2018 from the previous year. It went from 281 concussions during regular-season games in 2017 to 214 concussions in 2018.
Both of those numbers are higher than years past. During the 2014 regular season, there were just 111 concussions and that was down from 148 in 2013 and 173 in 2012.
